Pizza & Pride & Prejudice

That's the plan for tomorrow night, anyway.

British Culture / Pop Culture Indoctrination continues apace.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

I used to be thrilled with the library in Ventnor, and continued to patronise it regularly when I lived at home after university, if more for the CD section than the books...anyway. I used to be thrilled with Ventnor Library. It is an airy white-walled building with an arched cieling and glass panels in the roof. I think it used to be a chapel or a small modern church. As a child I went to the small grey stone primary school called St. Wilfrid's just down and across the road from the library, and I remember how excited I was when regular trips there became part of our schooling. There was a whole section for children - we were 6 or 7 at the time - with hundreds of books. I was flabbergasted at the huge number of them, shelves and shelves and shelves, just books and books and more books...and they changed them round as well. They got new ones in and old ones disappeared. And it was free.

From the eyes of a primary school child with a literal mind, this was The Library. The children's section at Ventnor was and is a room of about twenty five feet by fifteen feet, with five shelves to a wall. I used to hold up the whole class, who were waiting outside in little grey shorts and skirts in neat pairs waiting to walk along the road back to the school, while I tried to decide which of the hundreds of books I would choose to take with me that day.

Today I became a member of the NYPL - the New York Public Library, and I spent about three and a half hours working in the Northern Reading Room of the main library building on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue - the one from the start of Ghostbusters - the building which sits strong and elegant on Bryant Park, squat in comparison to the skyscrapers and other office buildings around it.

I liked it a lot.
I think a lot of libraries could of course be improved by enormous, vaulting, renaissance-style painted ceilings with gold embossing and large windows, with seating for several hundred, internet and power points, and a collection of books the like of which I've never seen. But I also liked the atmosphere. Periodically as I was working, couples still clad for the outside weather would stroll past, staring upwards, or taking photographs. They were quiet, and it gave the place a continually renewed sense of appreciation in me. I would lose myself in my work and then the flash of a camera would pull me out of it and I would look in the direction of the picture and think, 'Yeah, that's beautiful,' before going back to work.

Another thing is that along with the tendency for New York organisations to abbreviate themselves with Four Letter Acronyms - NYPD, FDNY, NYCD, NYSD, NYPL, DKNY, ASNY etc, (Police Department, Fire Department, Corrections Department, Sanitation Department, Public Library, Donna Karan and Autoblography Stuart respectively) there are slogans to go with them. Most readers will be familiar with 'New York's Finest' for the Police, a few others with 'New York's Bravest' for the Fire Department...and this is where it gets interesting.
The sanitation department, unsurprisingly for an organisation tasked with keeping one of the largest and dirtiest cities in the world in shipshape condition, are 'New York's Strongest'.
The corrections department tasked with, euphemistically, correcting those who choose to stray from the well-trodden path of acceptable behaviour in society, are touted as 'New York's Boldest'. The acronym-less New York Board of Education (I mean, let's face it, when was the last time the mayor needed to call for a large truck full of body-armoured teachers with a natty acronym pasted on the side?) are 'New York's Brightest'. I haven't got one, and DKNY are 'New York's Elitest'.

All this marketing and organisational pride has left some groups feeling a bit left out. The Parks for example had a competition to come up with a similar logo in 2000, with no discernible winner, which must have come as a real blow to New York's Greenest Fingered.

On the subject of New York's parks, something extremely exciting is coming up in New York in February. In the past these artists have surrounded some Floridian islands in a suffusion of pink and completely wrapped the Reichstag and the Pont Neuf in Paris, and on the 16th of February Christo and Jeanne Claude are unveiling The Gates in Central Park - over 7,000 gates with...well. You'll have to go to the site and see the sketches. It looks really exciting, and I can't wait to see it all go up.

Anyway. I was writing in the library today, and it felt good.